For eleven years the ninth Duke of Ashgrave had kept his scarred face out of every room in England. Then a carriage went into a ditch in a storm, and Mercy Ren — who fed strangers before she asked what they were worth — looked at him without flinching. He lied about his name. She forgave him. His cousin Reginald never would.

PART 3

The knock on the door was not his.

It was a servant in Ashgrave livery, standing in the rain like a herald of weather, and behind him, arriving at the threshold of Thorncraft Cottage in the week when the chimney smoked and the steep work was half-done, was Reginald Ashworth.

He did not look like a man arriving to announce catastrophe. He looked like a man arriving to enjoy one.

“Miss Ren,” he said, smiling, stepping into her kitchen without being bidden, “I have heard such a great deal about you. I have come to see the cottage that has quite captured my cousin.”

Behind him, at the garden gate, Mr. Grayson stood frozen — hammer hanging at his side, mud on his boots, caught mid-visit like a boy caught at a window. His face did not flinch. That was the horrible thing. The scarred side of his face held perfectly still, while the rest of him did something Mercy had never seen a man do with a hammer in his hand, which was nothing at all.

“Cousin,” said Mr. Grayson. “You are a long way from the Hall.”

“Am I?” Reginald’s smile widened. “And you, cousin, are a long way from — well. From everything.” He looked around the kitchen with frank, courteous contempt. “Mr. Grayson. How very modest of you. A horse worth more than this cottage and its acreage together, and you pass yourself off under a millman’s name.”

He turned to Mercy, and made her a little bow.

“It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Miss Ren,” Reginald said. “I confess I had not expected my cousin’s taste to run — here.”

Something in Gideon’s throat moved. “Leave.”

“I shall,” Reginald said pleasantly. “I have seen all I came to see. Miss Ren —” that smile again, white and even, the smiling of a man cataloguing a house he intends to walk through at leisure afterward — “I do hope you will not be too distressed when the truth there is to be known about you becomes known. It is ever the way with these little romances. They bruise.”

Then he was gone, and the rain closed behind him like a curtain over an interval, and the kitchen was very quiet.

Mercy did not look at him. She looked at the fire.

“Six visits,” she said. “Six visits, and a hammer, and a lie.”

“I did not tell you sooner because you looked at me without flinching,” Gideon said, “and I did not know how to risk losing that by giving you a title to look at instead of a man.”

That turned her. The firelight moved over his face, the scarred side and the unmarred, and Mercy looked at both of them with the same level, unafraid attention she had given his arm on the first night.

“I am Gideon Ashworth,” he said. “Duke of Ashgrave. I have not been seen by the county in eleven years. I was going to tell you tonight. I had a speech. I practised it riding here. It was very long, and very poor.”

“You have been lying to me for six months about the single largest fact of who you are,” Mercy said. “What does that make of the rest of it? The storm. The shoulder. The rabbits.”

“The rabbits are true,” Gideon said. “The rabbits are entirely true. The shutters are mine — your shutters hang worse than a drunk man’s grammar, and no offense to drunk men. The chimney I swept for you until my back locked into a question-mark and I had to lie down on your floor for an hour, and I told you it was because I had not eaten.” He was breathing hard. “I have spent four years — no. Spare me. I have spent four years being seen only for what I lack.” His voice cracked on it. “I have spent eleven years being seen only for what I lack. And you looked at my face that first night as though it were weather, and I had forgotten what it felt like to be looked at like that, and I did not dare hand you the title he could hand you in its place.”

The fire ticked.

“And you,” he said. “You, who fed me from your own last pot before you knew whether I was a duke or a beggar — I tell myself every day the girl who did that will not suddenly value the man by his coronet.”

“I do not,” Mercy said quietly. “I value him by his sash. It is crimson, and he wore it over his good shirt, and it is still misbuttoned to this day.”

She had misbuttoned it. The morning of the crossroads, his good arm aching, his bad arm useless, she had helped him dress, and her fingers had been shaking with cold and tiredness, and the sash had never forgiven her.

His face did something then that eleven years of county loneliness had — she would learn this later — been starved of. He laughed. It was an awful sound, unpracticed, breaking halfway, and it was the only honest thing he had said to her all winter.

Then he said: “I will only ask you to let me try to earn it. The trust. I will spend the rest of my life earning the day I first lied to you, and I will spend it gladly, so long as you keep looking at my face like it is weather.”

Mercy said nothing. But she did not send him away either, and somewhere between the fading of Reginald’s horse on the lane and the first breaking of the next sprig of honest green on the fells, the careful ease between them began, slowly, to come back — awkward now, stripped of the pretending, but alive, and hers, and his.

And in those weeks of cautious rebuilding, when Gideon finally told her the full story of the fire — of the smoking library, his father’s papers, the wall of flame that had met him in the passage — he said, for the first time aloud, in a voice that made her go still:

“Mercy. I have never believed it was an accident.”

The fire jumped in the grate. She waited for him to say it, and he said it.

“I have never had proof of anything beyond unhappy timing. But I did not, in truth, wish to know for certain. It was easier, all these years, to suspect a cousin and do nothing than to know a cousin and have to act.”

“And now?” Mercy said.

“I find,” Gideon said, slowly, “that I have rather more reason to want the truth of it settled than I did a fortnight ago. There are people now to protect. And I have spent eleven years guarding my own quiet at the expense of everything I have loved.” He looked at her. “I do not intend to let him frighten me out of this.”